Wallace was the son of a philosophy professor and an English teacher. He received a B.A. from Amherst College in 1985. He was completing a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona when his highly regarded debut novel, The Broom of the System (1987), was published. He later taught creative writing at Illinois State University and at Pomona College. He received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship grant in 1997.

Wallace became best known for his second novel, Infinite Jest (1996), a massive, multilayered novel that he wrote over the course of four years. In it appear a sweeping cast of postmodern characters that range from recovering alcoholics and foreign statesmen to residents of a halfway house and high-school tennis stars. Presenting a futuristic vision of a world in which advertising has become omnipresent and the populace is addicted to consumerism, Infinite Jest takes place during calendar years that have been named by companies that purchased the rights to promote their products. Infinite Jest was notably the first work of Wallace’s to feature what was to become his stylistic hallmark: the prominent use of notes (endnotes, in this case), which were Wallace’s attempt to reproduce the nonlinearity of human thought on the page. Critics, who found Wallace’s self-conscious, meandering writing style variously exhilarating and maddening, compared Infinite Jest to the novels of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.

Wallace’s short stories are collected in Girl with Curious Hair (1989), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), and Oblivion (2004). He was also an acclaimed nonfiction writer, using his signature digressive, footnote-heavy prose to produce elaborate essays on such seemingly uncomplicated subjects as the Illinois state fair, talk radio, and luxury cruises. His essay collections include A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster, and Other Essays (2005). Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003) is a survey of the mathematical concept of infinity. He also wrote, with Mark Costello, Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present (1990; 2nd ed. 1997).

Wallace had suffered from depression since his early 20s, and, after numerous failed attempts to find an efficacious drug regimen, he took his own life. Three years after Wallace’s death, another novel, The Pale King (2011), which the author had left unfinished, was released. The book was assembled by Michael Pietsch(, who had long been Wallace’s editor). It is set in an Internal Revenue Service office in Peoria, Ill., U.S., Illinois, during the late 20th century. Most of its characters are examiners of annual income tax returns, and the book’s central theme is boredom—specifically, boredom as a potential means of attaining bliss and, as such, an alternative to the culture of overstimulation that was is the main subject of Infinite Jest. A third collection of his nonfiction writing, Both Flesh and Not (2012), was also published posthumously.